Of Barack Obama’s contacts and associations with anti-American political figures, none is more controversial than Frank Marshall Davis, a writer and poet identified as a member of the Communist Party USA by several sources, including some sources sympathetic to him. Obama and Davis met in Hawaii, at a time when a young Obama was in need of a black role model and a mentor.

Obama’s relationship with Davis, including subsequent associations with radical, communist and socialist figures in Chicago, should be investigated for the benefit of promoting the public interest and the public’s right to know. America’s Survival, Inc. believes that any public figure with links to foreign and hostile interests should be asked to explain those associations.

In the case of Obama, a new figure on the national scene, the facts suggest that he could have serious difficulty getting a security clearance in the U.S. Government. An FBI background check was once used to examine one’s character, loyalty to the United States and associations.

The evidence shows that Obama’s friends chose him. But he chose his friends carefully as well.

Obama’s controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has strident anti-American views, links to such figures as Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, and has traveled to Cuba. But Frank Marshall Davis is a far more controversial figure because he was a member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). He was in Hawaii at the acknowledged suggestion of two other secret CPUSA members, actor Paul Robeson and labor leader Harry Bridges. Davis had been a writer for a CPUSA-controlled newspaper, the Honolulu Record.

All of the evidence summarized by veteran investigator and researcher Herbert Romerstein in the special report that follows, suggests that Davis was a key member of a Moscow-sponsored international communist network.

First, a word about Herbert Romerstein. He retired from the United States government after 25 years of service, including Investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Minority Chief Investigator for the House Committee on Internal Security, Professional Member for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and head of the Office of Counter Soviet Disinformation for the United States Information Agency.

Romerstein examines Davis’s time in Hawaii. Davis had come to Hawaii from Chicago, where Obama would eventually end up. It was in Chicago that Davis had been in contact with Robeson and Bridges and had edited another newspaper, the Chicago Star.

In other words, communist networks were in existence in the same two places that would provide the backdrop for Obama’s upbringing and political career. It could very well be the case that one network was connected in some way with the other. But more investigation needs to be done in this regard.

Significantly, the basic facts of the Obama-Davis relationship were originally disclosed by Professor Gerald Home, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, who talked about Obama coming under the influence of Davis during a speech at the reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The remarks were posted online under the headline, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party.”

Home, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who had moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 “at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson,” came into contact with Obama and his family. As Home describes it, Davis “befriended” a “Euro-American family” that had “migrated to Hawaii from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.”

From Hawaii, Obama would first go to Occidental College in Los Angeles, then to Columbia University and Harvard Law School, and finally Chicago, where he would start his political career. Occidental College might have been well-known to Davis because in 1948 it offered to host another balck poet. Langston Hughes, who was to speak on a poem of his entitled, “Goodbye Christ.” It declared:

“Goodbye,

Christ Jesus Lord Jehovah,

Beat it on away from here now.

Make way for a new guy with no religion at all—

A real guy named Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin worker ME….”

The California Legislature’s Fourth Report of the Senate Fact-finding Committee on Un-American Activities, dated 1948 and covering “Communist Front Organizations,” described Hughes as someone “said to rate Paul Robeson” as a notorious black communist. It called the “Goodbye Christ” poem blasphemous. However, conservative opposition forced Occidental to cancel the event. Hughes later broke with the communists.

It could be said that Obama didn’t choose to be associated with Davis. He was young and Davis was much older. On the other hand, Romerstein closes his report with a quotation from Obama’s own book, Dreams From My Father, in which he talks about how he chose his own associates and friends, and that they were among the most radical. These decisions may have reflected Davis’s influence over him.

It was at Occidental College that Obama says he came into contact with the “more politically active black students,” foreign students, the Chicanos, the “Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.” He chose these people to associate with, Obama says, because he wanted to avoid being perceived as a “sell-out.” At night, he said, “we discussed neocolonialism.”

The Marxist influence continued when he went to Columbia University. The intense political discussions he had at Occidental, he wrote, “came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem and Brooklyn during the summers…”

But it all started with Davis. Romerstein describes Davis as a key member of a communist network sponsored by Moscow in Hawaii that included Robeson and Bridges. He describes this network and its objectives in detail. The influence of this network was the subject of hearings by official government bodies because it was perceived to be a major threat to U.S. national security. Some of these hearings concerned “The Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States.”

Romerstein also explains that, after the CPUSA collapsed, Davis continued in Hawaii promoting communist propaganda and influencing people like a young Barack Obama. That si why it is so important to get to the bottom of what kind of relationship they had.

Curiously, Obama himself tried to obscure the identity of “Frank” in his book, Dreams From My Father, by concealing his middle and last names. Still, he acknowledges (page 22) that he came to respect “Frank” and other black men he knew “for struggles they went through, recognizing then as my own…” Obama wrote about “a poet named Frank,” who visited them in Hawaii, read poetry, and was full of “hard-earned knowledge” and advice. Obama also wrote about “Frank” having “some modest notoriety once” and being “a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago..” Obama said that “Frank” was “pushing eighty” and giving him advice before he left for Occidental College in 1979 at the age of 18. Obama refers to “Frank” and his old Black Power dashiki self.”

Interestingly, Obama displays some awareness of Davis and his significance. But as Romerstein notes, Davis called Wright’s decision to expose the CPUSA after leaving the party an “act of treason.” Davis said Wright had “aided only the racists who were constantly seeking any means to destroy cooperation between Reds and blacks” and had “damaged our battle.”

Was Obama aware of Wright’s break with the CPUSA and Davis’s decision to stay with it? What knowledge, in fact, does Obama have of Communist efforts to exploit blacks?

The continuing influence of Davis’s communist views over Obama could help explain why, when he went to college, he selected Marxist professors among his friends and admittedly attended socialist conferences. It could also help explain why, when he arrived in Chicago to pursue a political career, he came into contact with individuals associated with socialist and communist activities, such as Bill Ayers and Quentin Young. (These connections are explained at length in the second report in this series, Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection: http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/chicago-obama.pdf) Links between the Hawaii and Chicago networks should be actively investigated.

Home is not the only significant figure to talk about influence of “Frank” on Obama. Dr. Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii, who knew and interviewed Davis and wrote a disscertation on his life and career, confirmed to me that the “Frank” is in fact, Frank Marshall Davis.

Takara confirmed that Davis was a significant influence over Obama during the three or four years that he attended the Punahou prep school. These would have been the years 1975-1979. She said Obama had been introduced to Davis by his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who considered Davis a “strong black male figure” and thought he exerted a “positive” influence over the young man in his high-school years. “His grandfather was one of Frank’s closest friends,” she said. “They played chess or cards together.”

Takara, an Obama supporter, thinks the influence of Davis was positive as well and considered Davis a “loving man” who “did not have a hateful bone in his body.” She said Davis was a black role model for Obama and gave him a sense of democracy, equal opportunity and justice. She said Davis gave him “a sense of believing that change can happen “living in a diverse world.”

Asked why she thought Obama didn’t identify Davis in his book by his full name, she replied, “Maybe he didn’t want people delving into it.” She said that this could have had something to do with Davis’s lifestyle, rather than his politics. “Frank’s was a place where you could have drinks,” she said. Yet, Obama has been open about some things—such as his past drug use. It is difficult to understand why he would not name “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis simply because “Frank” drank or hosted people who did.

Regarding his political views, Takara said of Davis that, “He studied democracy. He knew democracy. He knew the value of democracy. And yet he was a critic.” She added that Davis “had a sense of who he was” and a “sense of self-esteem.”

The record shows, of course, that Davis was so much of a critic of the U.S. that he joined the CPUSA, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of the old Soviet Union. Takara disputes this, saying she didn’t think his CPUSA membership had been proven. But a congressional committee identified him as a party member (See Exhibits 1A and 2A) and John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas and expert on Davis’s writings and career, has confirmed that Davis joined the Communist Party but publicly tried to deny his communist affiliations.

“Sometime during the middle of the war, he (Davis) joined the Communist Party,” Tidwell writes in his book about Davis’s poems. Tidwell says that Davis “felt betrayed” when Soviet dictator Stalin signed the 1939 nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, which triggered World War II, but that Stalin’s eventual decision to join the U.S. and its allies in a war on the Axis powers “restored a measure of Davis’s confidence in the USSR.”

Similarly, The New Red Negro, by James Edward Smethurst, says that while Davis had said he was disturbed by the Hitler-Stalin pact, he did not break his alliance with the CPUSA over it.

Max Friedman, a longtime writer and researcher on internal security affaris, discovered that Davis testified in 1956 before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) and took the Fifth Amendment on the Communist Party membership. (See Exhibit 3A).

William Rusher, who served as associate counsel to the SISS in 1956-1957, has written that “it is hard for most people to imagine the influence that even a relatively small number of dedicated people can have, but CPUSA exerted significant power in its heyday—a heyday, be it remembered, in which the Soviet Union impressed many people as the wave of the future, destined to overwhelm a weak and fading West, including the United States.

Most telling, as noted by Romerstein, is the eyewitness account of how “Comrade Davis” came into a meeting of the NAACP and tried to maneuver it into support of “the Stalinist line.” (See Exhibit 4A).

This pro-Communist view was the mindset of Frank Marshall Davis, who spent many hours advising and reading poetry to a young Barack Obama.

Takara admits that Davis was accused of being a communist and that the FBI investigated him but she tried to insist that any black activist at this time faced such a charge. “Any group that was progressive was considered communist,” she said. “So I have never found yet that Frank was actually a communist. He certainly associated with people that were communists. But he certainly associated with people that were not communists.”

In fact, however, as Romerstein documents, responsible black and progressive groups viewed the communists, and Davis in particular, as agitators who hurt and damaged the cause of legitimate black rights.

Takara insists that Davis “loved America.” But the tone of his poem, Smash on, victory-eating Red Army,” could give people the opposite impression. It goes beyond hoping for the communists to beat the Nazis in World War II and hails the Soviet revolution:

“Show the marveling multitudes

Americans, British, all your allied brothers

How strong you are

How great your are

How your young tree of new unity

Planted twenty-five years ago

Bears today the golden fruit of victory!”

Takara commented, “That’s not untypical of that time. Remember many black intellectuals in the 40s went to Russia. He didn’t go to Russia. But many of them went to Russia. All of them were very disillusioned after the war about their treatment – to go and fight fascism abroad and come back and get lynched and not be able to vote.” In reference to another poem, “Christ is a Dixie Nigger,” Takara said that she believed that Davis was an atheist or agnostic who came to appreciate religion only later in his life when he was approaching death (he died in 1987). Religion she said, was a major reason why most blacks did not go into CPUSA, which was officially atheistic.

The poem dismisses Christ as “another New White Hope” and declares:

“Remember this, you wise guys

Your tales about Jesus of Nazareth are no-go with me

I’ve got a dozen Christs in Dixie all bloody and black…”

One Davis poem, “onward Christian Soldiers,” mocks the Christian hymn by the same name. It talks of Africans being killed with a “Christian gun” instead of a spear by the missionaries following “the religion of Sweet Jesus.” Another Davis poem refers to Christians “who buy righteousness like groceries.”

“I would say that Davis was more atheistic or agnostioc and I think that that follows kind of the tradition of some of the black intellectuals of that period who really didn’t understand if there was a God, how he could be so unjust,” Takara explained.

Obama writes in Dreams From My Father that he saw “Frank” only a few days before he left Hawaii for college, and that Davis seemed just as radical as ever. Davis called college “An advanced degree in compromise” and warned Obama not to forget his “people” and not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

Asked to interpret this advice, Takara said that Davis was trying to tell Obama that while college does teach people to assimilate into the society, “institutional racism is still around.” She explained, “You can learn a lot but you can lose a lot. I think Frank was giving him some practical advice. Frank was reminding Obama not to forget his people and who are his people? Mixed race. For me, that’s the exciting thing about Obama. He has a sense of black people and black people’s problems but he has also a sense of the white (people). He has a sense of other minority groups.”

Obama was the child of a white mother and black father. Davis, who was black, had married a white woman in Chicago.

Alluding to the absence of his father from his life, Obama has said, “I was raised in a setting with my grandparents who grew up in small town Kansas where, you know, the dinner table would have been very familiar to anybody here in Indiana – a lot of pot roast and potatoes and Jell-O molds.

On January 29, 2008, Obama had been in El Dorado, Kansas, where his grandfather attended high school. Governor Kathleen Sebelius declared that Obama had inherited the “Midwestern values” imported to Kansas voters. “He got them from his grandparents and his mother,” Sebelius said in a speech that gave him her endorsement. “He will lead with those values.” But those are not the values held by Frank Marshall Davis. And Obama has not spoken publicly about the influence of his childhood mentor. The public deserves the truth.”

Note:The following is a video discussion between Cliff Kincaid, President of America’s Survival and Trevor Loudon, an investigative blogger from New Zealand:

This video contains a one-hour discussion between Cliff Kincaid and New Zealand investigative blogger Trevor Loudon, who broke communist influence scandals involving Barack Obama and his inner circle. Trevor talks with Mr. Kincaid about the following topics:

Obama’s communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis.

Ousted White House “green jobs” czar Van Jones.

The role of White House adviser Valerie Jarrett in hiring Jones.

How Obama, Jones and White House director of political affairs Patrick Gaspard, a former official of the Service Employees International Union, came to the White House out of the same communist networks.

The role of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress as a “shadow government” in supplying Marxist radicals to the Obama Administration.

The failure of the Obama Justice Department to prosecute the Weather Underground terrorists who murdered San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell.

The Justice Department decision to promote the “medical marijuana” scam, and the role of dangerous mind-altering drugs in controlling people.

The role of a communist, Harry Hay, in founding the modern “gay rights” movement.

The Obama appointment of Harry Hay supporter, Kevin Jennings, to a high post in the federal Department of Education.”

Follow-up Letter To NM U.S. Congressman Martin Heinrich Regarding My Request For Full-scale Investigation Into Allegations Made By Sheriff Arapio’s Cold Case Posse!–Posted on We The People USA-By Jake Martinez-On July 26, 2012:

Follow-up Letter To NM U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman Regarding My Request For Full-scale Investigation Into Allegations Made By Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse!–Posted on We The People USA-By Jake Martinez-On July 26, 2012:

Follow-up Letter To NM U.S. Senator Udall Requesting Congressional Investigation Into Allegations Made By Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse!–Posted on We The People USA-By Jake Martinez-On July 25, 2012:

Follow-up Letter To NM U.S. Senator Udall Requesting Congressional Investigation Into Allegations Made By Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse!-Posted on We The People USA-By Jake Martinez-On April 24, 2012:

Video of ASI “Communism in the Classroom” Conference; Learn how Communist Professors Like Bill Ayers Are Brainwashing College Students. Speakers include Paul Kengor, Mary Grabar, and Cliff Kincaid–Posted on USASurvival.org:

Follow-up Letter To NM U.S. Senator Udall Requesting Congressional Investigation Into Allegations Made By Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse!-Posted on We The People USA-By Jake Martinez-On July 25, 2012:

21 Responses

Although Obama’s book indicates “Frank” was a family friend who offered him advice on racial issues, Obama wrote that Davis “fell short” and his views were “incurable.” Obama did not even visit Davis for three years before going to college. Obama’s book, itself, proves that Obama did not consider Davis to be a “wise and trusted counselor,” which is the definition of “mentor.” By what creative definition can Davis be considered his “mentor”?

By exaggerating evidence that Davis advised Obama, yet ignoring evidence from the same source that Obama did NOT Frank to be a wise and trusted advisor, those who claim Davis was Obama’s “mentor” are as dishonest as ex-D.A. Mike Nifong. The “Nifong Syndrome” is the stacking of evidence by ignoring evidence that does not fit one’s agenda. By portraying Davis as Obama’s mentor, despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, Cliff Kincaid and others have proven void of journalistic integrity. They are unreliable sources of information on the Davis-Obama relationship. As the epitome of contemporary yellow journalism, Cliff Kincaid may be a worthy successor to Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels.

Let us evaluate the empirical evidence with dispassionate objectivity, rather than accepting unsubstantiated accusations and deliberate misrepresentation from pundits of questionable integrity. If you believe that Cliff Kincaid and his Scaife network associate Bill Steigerwald have integrity, ask them simple questions like “Why did you publish that Davis was a lifelong member of the CPUSA?” (Steigerwald), and “Why did you call Davis a Stalinist?” (Kincaid). See if they answer. They are stonewalling, because they cannot prove those false accusations.

Although “I’m hardly interested in proving my research to Kincaid or any of those whose work is a travesty to scholarship,” University of Kansas Professor Edgar Tidwell, whom AIM’s Cliff Kincaid cites as “an expert on the life and writings of Davis,” dismisses misrepresentation of Davis’s influence in one simple paragraph:

“Although my research indicates that Davis joined the CPUSA as a “closet member” during World War II, there is no evidence that he was a Stalinist, or even a Party member before WWII. Further, to those attempting to make the specious stand for the concrete, there is no evidence that he instructed Barack Obama in communist ideology. Frank Marshall Davis did NOT believe in overthrowing the USA. He was committed to what the nation professed to be. For him, communism was primarily an intellectual vehicle to achieve a political end-a possible tool for gaining the constitutional freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for ALL Americans” (see http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/Kaleokualoha ).

If intellectual engagement and sincere substantive discussions are the goals of your blog, I welcome the opportunity to pursue the truth through cordial debate with you and your readers. If, on the other hand, your blog is designed to squelch dissent through ad hominem attacks and moderator censorship, then I understand your familiar position. Thanks!

“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.”
– Abraham Lincoln